[Tinyos-devel] [nescc-devel] nesC 1.3.0 beta3

[Razvan Musaloiu-E.]

Hi!

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Philip Levis wrote:

> On Jun 23, 2008, at 3:15 PM, Vlado Handziski wrote:
>
>> I think it is high time that we drop SF. We can either move to git
>> or svn. We can host a public repo on Google or github or whatever.
>> And this being an open source project, with a very limited set of
>> people that commit to the repository, we can live perfectly well
>> without the fine grained per folder access controls. The peer
>> pressure to keep the HEAD or trunk or whatever in working state is
>> more than enough.
>
>
> Access permissions come from 1.x, and when contrib was a subdirectory.
> Even now, as a separate module, write access to 2.x contrib provides
> write access to the entire tree. Without per-directory permissions,
> this means any and all contrib parties can write to tos/. I'd agree
> that a limited number of people commit to tos/, tools/, and support/.
> Contrib is a wholly different story.
>
> The motivation for this limitation is maintenance. There are certain
> configuration variables and files which users often change in their
> local installations. E.g., the default frequency for mica2, the AM
> group, the 15.4 channel. By giving any and all contrib parties write
> access to the main tree, this in some ways raises the bar of the
> degree of care they have to apply when committing, and also means that
> the people maintaining the core need to be more vigilant about
> watching commits. The commit that removed the LPL warnings is a recent
> example. There were many cases in 1.0/1.1 where developers (contrib
> and otherwise) accidentally checked in changes which broke other
> people's code and led to days of debugging to find the source.
> Avoiding that kind of hair-pulling is good.
>
> As far as I see it, svn has two major advantages over CVS, neither of
> which seem to be a big issue that we find painful:
>
> 1) Atomic commits
> 2) Can move directories

Another nice feature in SVN is the possibility of setting the executable 
flag through normal SVN commands.

> It also makes branching a little easier. Git has these benefits, plus
> the ability to maintain a local repository.

I consider this a very useful feature but I know that Phil doesn't. :-(

>
> Which of these is a pressing problem whose cost outweighs the
> maintenance benefit of access permissions?

How about moving the tinyos-2.x to SVN and keeping the tinyos-2-contrib in 
CVS?

Another thing that makes SF very annoying is the fact that is very-very 
slow from time to time. Sometime in the most inappropriate moments. :|

--
Razvan ME